Outstanding Faculty

Sylvia Bowman Award

Michael McGerr

History, IUB

McGerr demonstrates to students the links between history and their individual lives in ways that excite, entertain and inform. In perfecting a large class lecture, he has adopted several strategies to reach students and prepares his lectures minutely, using two overhead projectors while teaching: one is devoted to a general outline of the day's lecture, the other to details of individual topics within the lecture. For McGerr, catching student interest is a means to a larger end‹understanding and appreciation of history. He often represents American history through the eyes of young adults of that time period and links their personal crises to larger events. His students begin to see history as a subject in which public events and personal lives are connected.